Gittin' to Know Y'all: Improvised Music, Interculturalism and the Racial Imagination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines one of the first extensively documented musical collaborations between two experimental music communities that emerged at around the same moment in time: members of the European “free jazz” or “free improvisation” movement, an international development that spanned the continent, and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a product of Chicago’s racially segregated, all-black South Side. The collaboration, organized by the important critic and radio producer Joachim Ernst Berendt, took place in 1969 at the Baden-Baden “Free Jazz Treffen” in the German Schwarzwald. While the goals, methods, materials, geographical base, historical outlook, political and cultural stances, and critical reception of the two avant-gardes differ markedly, both of these movements are framed in music histories as key representatives of a second generation of the “free jazz” movement spearheaded by Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane, among many others. By 1965, these two experimental networks, based on different continents and unaware of each other, yet sharing important characteristics, goals and acknowledged musical antecedents, were in the process of crystallization. A studio recording from the “Free Jazz Treffen” was released in 1970 under Lester Bowie's leadership, bearing the pointedly ironic title, “Gittin’ To Know Y'All." Reading the history of the two avant-gardes around the Bowie recording, the essay seeks answers to the question of why these two avant-gardes, despite their seeming compatibilities, remain relatively distanced from each other in terms of certain kinds of collaborations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.075 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".